Vital to our
infrastructure, bridges require regular maintenance to ensure safety for the
cars, trucks, rails, and people regularly traversing them. Many bridges are 50
years or older, with citizens traveling across structurally deficient bridges
every day.
“Structural
health monitoring of bridges clarifies which repairs need to be prioritized,”
says IEEE Senior Member Clint Andrews. “The deferred maintenance backlog has
become so severe that it is easy to just throw up your hands and invest
opportunistically in repairs, but the proper way is to prioritize based on the
timely status information.”
Technologists are
utilizing sensors and other smart technologies to monitor and protect our
bridges and from irreparable damage to the infrastructure or the people
involved if a structure collapsed.
While sensors are
being used to detect early warnings of a catastrophic structural failure, they
are also gathering important data about necessary structural repairs after a
natural weather event like an earthquake or hurricane.
“In terms of
civil management, the wireless sensors are commonly used to monitor and report
the physical condition of bridges, such as the slip-factor and humidity,” says
IEEE Member Yidong Li. “Estimating traffic on different road segments would
provide very useful information for further analysis and decisions that would
be taken or generated by the system.”
Gathering this
type of data is also helpful for city management, providing the public with
real-time traffic conditions.
To create smart
cities or Next-Generation
Cities that are tech, citizen, and eco-friendly, solutions need to be super-efficient.
Innovations like IoT and the use of sensor technology for
waste disposal are a few instances. According
to IBEF, India will be the third-largest market for construction by 2022.
Sensors are also used for emergency rescue situations in remote areas. “If there’s an emergency condition on the roadside and emergency services can’t be reached nearby due to a lot of traffic, in this scenario, emergency vehicles can be triggered automatically through the connection of nearby wireless sensors sharing location details of the spot to those services,” explains IEEE Senior Member Aiyappan Pillai.
HOW DO SENSORS PROTECT BRIDGES?
A wireless sensor
device, also known as a wireless sensor node, has a sensing unit connected to a
processing unit, a communication unit and a power unit. The sensor will also
have storage memory.
“The sensing unit
may include one or many sensors for data acquisition of any physical phenomena
of interest, such as temperature, humidity, strain and acceleration. There is
also a signal conditioning unit, which incorporates an analog-to-digital
converter (ADC) unit for converting the analog signals,” says Li. “The
processing unit is the main controller of the node. It is responsible for
managing the wireless sensor node operations, including sensing and wireless
communication. It generally consists of an on-board computer (i.e. a
microcontroller unit) with processing and data storage capabilities.”
“When we monitor
bridges, we apply a large number of sensor nodes to formulate a wireless
sensors network (WSN) and the sensors formulate data acquisition subsystems,”
Li adds.
Therefore, to support the smooth functioning of bridges, it is
essential to have sensor technologies and city management will only further
help in providing a personalized experience for the city's businesses and
people.
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